But notice I keep saying: search engine value, SEO value. What are social media really links for? People! They are social.
There are two different ways to get web traffic: from search engines, when people search the web to find something, and from social recommendation, word of mouth. To put it another way, we can promote to one of two audiences: search engines or people.
Social promotion is different from search engine optimization. People do not want keywords. People do not want a firehose of backlinks. People don't care about pagerank, and they certainly don't care about promoting your content for you. They hate spam.
People want something in return. They want excellent, funny, awesome content that they enjoy or find useful. They want to hear from you as a person. They want to see you're not in their social community to self-promote, but to contribute meaningfully to the community. Do you comment? Do you share other great sites you've come across? Are you passionate about the same subjects they are? Are your shares funny, fascinating, or helpful? Do you post rare nuggets of pure gold, or do you spam people with 10-20 links a day?
Word-of-mouth promotion is hard to earn. You have to have fantastic content, and you have to be a good webizen, a true member of a social community. Social communities recognize self-promoters and will turn on them, viewing lots of self-link-dropping with suspicion and malice.
Earn your place in a social community. Bring something valuable. Give people something they love. Then, as with an author earning readers out in the real world, you will begin to gain longterm followers who recommend your work to friends. If you've built up trust and proven that you have excellent content to share, then you may share your own work, too.
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